The Performance Divide
Powerful AMD Athlon CPUs are giving desktops the biggest speed advantage over notebooks we've seen in years. The average WorldBench 5 score for the four top power desktops on this month's Top Desktops chart--all of them equipped with either a single- or dual-core 2.6-GHz Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU and 2GB of RAM--is 141. That's more than 40 percent higher than the score of 100 turned in by Acer's TravelMate 8200, arguably the best-equipped notebook in this roundup, with a 2-GHz Core Duo T2500 dual processor and 2GB of RAM.
This could translate into extra seconds or perhaps minutes required to complete various tasks on a notebook, particularly heavy-duty processing such as editing graphics or recalculating a large spreadsheet. Still, any notebook here should be equal to any task set before them.
The performance of the HP Pavilion dv8000z, the only notebook in the group to use a single-core processor, helps illustrate the advantage of dual-core notebooks. Though it was a strong performer overall, with a WorldBench 5 score of 95, the dv8000z fell behind in our multitasking testing (in which a PC browses the Internet while converting a sound file), taking almost 12 minutes to finish, compared with the group average of a little over 8 minutes, a 30 percent difference. The Alienware m7700's dual-core CPU, which is designed for desktops, provided about a 10 percent performance boost over the notebooks with Intel Core Duo processors in our multitasking tests.
Desktop PCs with the latest graphics card technologies remain the clear winners in graphics performance, but many notebooks can hold their own. The Dell Inspiron E1705, featuring nVidia's new GeForce Go 7900 GS chip with 256MB of video memory (an option Dell says it will offer by next month), won all of our graphics performance tests except Doom 3 run at a resolution of 1024 by 768 and 32-bit color with antialiasing turned off. In that test, the Gateway M685-E achieved 102 frames per second versus the E1705's 98 fps. The Toshiba Qosmio couldn't support high-end games due to its underpowered graphics; and the HP Pavilion dv8000z's integrated graphics make it a poor choice for gaming.
Photograph: Rick RiznerThe average battery life of the notebooks we looked at was a shade less than 3 hours. We were pleasantly surprised that the Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV600 came out on top, lasting 3 hours, 52 minutes. Next best was HP's Compaq nx9420 at 3 hours, 34 minutes, followed by the single-core HP Pavilion dv8000z at 3 hours, 9 minutes, and the Dell Inspiron E1705 at 3 hours, 4 minutes. The remaining three--including the Alienware Aurora m7700 at 1 hour, 36 minutes--ran for less than 3 hours each. The m7700's mark was predictable, given the power drain exacted by desktop processors.
When it comes to storage, it's now possible to obtain up to four 500GB hard drives--2 terabytes--in one tower. Many desktops also come with drives in a RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration. This means that the system distributes the data between two identical hard drives to enhance speed or to mirror the content for fault tolerance. Notebook hard drives have only recently broken the 200GB barrier, and few come with RAID capability. The exception here is Alienware's Aurora m7700. Though our model came with a single 160GB drive, you can choose instead to have two 7200-rpm SATA 160GB hard drives in a RAID configuration. One of our two Best Buys, the HP Pavilion dv8000z, had the greatest amount of storage, with dual 120GB hard drives for a total of 240GB.
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